SharePoint Videos

Thursday, April 20, 2006

MSN Messenger 7.0 introduced the notion of a personal message, a small message that's not poisening your nickname if you want to share something with your contacts. Quite a lot of people are using this nowadays to put their favorite quote over there or just to share a random thought. Beside of the manual entry of a personal message, such a message can be automatically generated as well by an external application.

This way, it's possible to show your friends "what you're listening to". Basically, a music player such as Windows Media Player does some IPC (Inter-Process Communication) to MSN Messager using the Win32 API every time the song which is currently playing changes. The nice thing is that you can write your own plug-in using some relatively simple C#:

1. Create a Windows Forms application and open the source code view for the Form1.cs form.

Basically, this method takes three parameters.The first indicated whether to display a message or not.The second one contains a category which can be "Office", "Games" or "Music".The last parameter takes the message itself.

Assuming MSN Messenger 7.0 is running on your machine (in the current user session), a call to:SendMSNMessage(true, "Office", "Hello World"); would put "(Office logo) Hello World" behind your nickname in MSN. By calling: SendMSNMessage(false, "Office", ""); the message will be gone and the old personal message of MSN will be restored. Note that for this to work, you should put on the feature "What I'm listening to" in MSN 7.0. It's this feature which listens to incoming IPC messages in order to display them.